the jargon summaryA Linux Server Admin who's into FOSS2016-12-09T13:25:04Zhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/feed/atom/WordPress.comjargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=1442016-07-12T13:38:15Z2014-07-12T09:15:01Z]]>I installed Debian Wheezy on my netbook a couple of days ago and forgot to install the Broadcom wifi drivers, while I still had wired access. Now, this morning in the comfort of my bed I wanted to get online from my netbook and realized I have no working wifi on it. Luckily, I happened to have a second laptop with working wireless with me to use as the package downloader, downloaded the required packages to USB drive and copied them to my netbook.

These instructions are for the Broadcom BCM4312 driver, and these are the files you need to download:

Keep in mind the broadcom-wl version is obviously going to change over time.

Once you have copied both files to your wireless-less computer, do the following:

$ sudo dpkg -i b43-fwcutter_XXXXXX_.deb
The XXXXXX depends on your version of the b43-fwcutter package

$ export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”

$ tar xvjf broadcom-wl-4.178.10.4.tar.bz2

$ cd broadcom-wl-4.178.10.4

$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” ./linux/wl_apsta.o

If everything completed without errors, reboot your system and then enjoy your wifi.

]]>2jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=1372016-07-12T13:38:02Z2014-03-26T12:16:19Z]]>There is a daring wonder and imaginative outlook that powers the mind of a child, or a childlike mind. There are things in this world that are only visible to children. Things that can only be perceived through the unadulterated, unconditioned, uninhibited eyes of a child. If you cast your mind back to your childhood, everything seemed so much bigger. So much more intense. Years later, if you came back and visited your old school, everything seemed so much smaller and duller than you remember. Uninteresting. Almost embarrassing. It all seemed so huge back then.

And it’s not the perspective of different body height at play here. No, I don’t think so. It’s the loss of innocence. The foundation for that daringly wondering gaze into a world of the fantastical is innocence. When we grow up we lose our innocence. When we become adults we find ourselves inhabiting the wrong side of the childhood-adulthood dichotomy. We become those whom as children we looked on as nay-saying authoritarian spoil sports. As kids we frown upon those party pooper grownups designated to the administration of our development. Then we grow up and become the party pooper ourselves.

We have become the enemy. Now we have blood on our hands. And suddenly we find ourselves incapable of seeing through the eyes of our own childhood. We are locked out of an entire universe. A universe without bills, or work or obligations. A universe with far more important problems.

Problems of discovering questions to which adults seem to chronically lack adequate answers. The human brain is probably the most powerful tool we have out our disposal. And it’s wasted on adults. There is a single minded dogmatic conformism perpetrated by years worth of academic indoctrination, that goes all the way back to the first day of kindergarten and culminates in what is colloquially referred to as “being a productive member of society”. This dogma is what mutilates our mind, clips the wings of our own creativity and aligns us with a very very narrow spectrum of what is referred to as acceptable behaviour.

“Grow up!”. What do you think happened to the monsters under your bed? Or the ones in your closet? Where did your imaginary friends go to? The creepy things that lived in the dark corner of your childhood room and only came out at night when the lights were switched off? Gone? Never even existed? Then why are children still seeing them?

Most adult people I ask say they don’t dream much or don’t dream of anything interesting, or just can’t remember what they dreamt of the night before. Locked out. Blinded by responsibility. Productivity. Conformity. Tradition. These same people probably love watching Game of Thrones. Or Avengers. Battlestar Galactica. Why?

Why? Because somewhere deep within the forgotten and forgettable recesses of your reconfigured soul, in a cold and dark dungeon, is a cell that holds a political prisoner. The real you. The real you is captive to the now you. You can’t kill it without killing yourself in the process. So you lock it away and you don’t talk about it in polite company. Some of you keep them chained in the dungeons of your self-repression, this real you. And the rest of the world gets the prescribed and pre-approved and authorized now you. But you can’t let the real you die without dying yourself. So you feed it. You feed it with stories that try to imitate that other bigger universe. The one you can’t seem to see anymore.

Some of you will not turn your backs on that universe. You refuse to abandon the universe with a sun behind the sun. The universe with the Witch Moon. The universe with the living trees that have dead things living in them. The universe where in your dreams at night you fly from treetop to treetop and the leaves speak to you. Where the fantastical is every day and every day’s an adventure.

And so you make a deal with the monster under your bed. It agrees to move over a bit, to make room for the real you. To make room for all the wonder and enchantment. After all, who would ever think to look for them there?

At night you fly into the universe. And by day you go out into the world and play their game. After all, playing is what you do best.

]]>0jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=1342016-07-12T13:37:53Z2014-03-01T19:45:18Z]]>When someone you don’t seem to know greets you like they know you… is it awkward to say “I have no clue who you are or why you just said hi. Have we met?” Ever since I moved to Rwanda, I have noticed that a lot of people know me. Many of whom I’m sure I’ve never met before, and some of whom I have probably ran into briefly. I’m terrible at remembering names and often faces of people I just met. I’m always embarrassed to tell people I don’t remember them. A lot of people take it personally and then things get even more awkward than they already are by default. Most times, when people are being introduced to me, their names go in through one ear and then right out the other ear. That’s not because I don’t care. It’s because I am trying hard to memorize your face so I can remember you next time.

This has strange side effects. For example. I might know someone for a couple weeks or longer and not remember their name, and be too ashamed to ask. So I ask other people or wait for someone else to call that person by their name.

Majority of our students I don’t know their names. And some I don’t even seem to remember their faces. A month ago or so, one of our students came asking for wifi access. I was confused and asked “Errr, where are from?” You know? Like, who are you with? State your purpose. He tells me he’s a student. From the 2014 graduating set, even. Wow. Sorry, dude. Sure you can access the wifi.

Ironically, I love to give people nicknames. And most times other people will adopt the use of these nicknames, too.

I guess it’s like that old saying, if you can’t beat them, make them join you. Right?

]]>0jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=1252016-07-12T13:37:44Z2013-01-14T12:14:03Z]]>I love Python. These days, I do almost all of my coding in Python, and what little I don’t, I do in Bash. Since I started hosting my python scripts on GitHub I got a bit more conscious about the way my code looks. I pay more attention to descriptive naming and proper commenting, but I think I still have some work ahead of me, before my code become PEP-8 compliant. In the meantime, I have a command-line python script called pytemplate that generates a new python file containing pre-configured information like file name, author name, email, license, etc. Optionally, pytemplate will also create a git repository for your script. Read the Readme for details on how to use pytemplate.]]>0jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=1222016-07-12T13:37:36Z2012-06-19T12:33:59Z]]>I’m old enough (37) to have known what it was like to use snail mail (handwritten pages, envelopes and stamps) as the default mode of personal long-distance communication. It seems archaic now, but I used to love writing/reading sending/receiving letters. There was joy in it for me, to get sheets of paper, find a pen, sit down and start writing a letter. Writing a six-page letter (A4 paper), front and back, was my usual “Hey, just wanted to say hi” length of letter, and people loved it. They said it was fun reading my long letters. Other times when I had more to say, things on my mind that need expressing, a letter from me could easily become twice to three times that long. I enjoyed writing. And then folding the papers and putting them in an envelope. Writing my friend’s/brother’s/sister’s/mother’s name and address on the envelope. Taking the envelope to the post office and paying for a stamp(s) to be affixed to the upper right-hand corner of the envelope. Watching the stamp(s) get rubberstamped, and seeing my letter being tossed in the outbound bin.

I loved it. Every step of it. Now with emails, I can barely find the time or inclination to reply emails, let alone initiate one. Putting together a 2-line email to friends or family feels like a chore now, yet here I am writing this multi-paragraph post to complete strangers on the internet. I’m all keyboard now, and only ever use a pen to sign stuff or scribble notes or a quick flowchart. I don’t know why this is so. Do you?

And speaking of emails, I’m told that’s becoming dated too, in terms of preferred mode of communication. I’m told, most of the “youth” today are not even old enough to have used email in their everyday communication. Can it be true? Is it all SMS, IM, tweet and chat now? Is that the way of it? Well, consider someone who was born on 9/11 would be 11 years old this year. Are my grandkids (assuming I manage to pull of finding someone to make *kids* with, first) going to ask me “Grandpa, did you used to write emails? What was it like, having to do all that typing?”

The other day, a colleague asked me if I was watching the second season of A Game of Thrones. I told her I had read books 1-5, and found the second season of the TV series had heavily deviated from the original story, so much so that I refused to watch that nonsense, and instead decided to just wait for books 6 and 7. She said she didn’t read. I love libraries. Deeply. I’ve always loved reading. As a kid I would easily read a 700-page novel in 3 days. Take down 2-3 of those in a week, depending on how riveted I was by the stories. But books seem to be disappearing and everything is going tablet/phone/e-reader. I love the new book smell. The old book smell. The textures of different types of pages. I might have become less verbose with my emails, but at least I still find it in me to ramble endlessly on the internets.

And I still read, though not anywhere near as much and as fast as I used to. Less time. Shorter attention span. So many bits and snippets to read on the web today. Skip lines, breeze through, get the gist of it, then move on. (TL;DR!) RSS feed backed up to three weeks ago.All those open browser tabs. The unread emails. Mark Folder Read. And none of it smells like adventure, or intergalactic battle, or dark mystery. It’s all 1s and 0s now. Digital information deluge at the speed of thought. Variable font styles encased in banner ads, drowning in pagination horror.

What am I going to tell my grandkids. Will they even be able to relate?

My mouse, the Logitech Trackman Marble. I’ve had this device for two years now and it has vastly improved my pointing device UX. It stays completely out of the way, no pick-up-and-shift-pick-up-and-shift clack-clack-clack, no distracting red laser. Just silent efficiency. I love it. Picture taken with my Nokia N900 using Solarize effect (installed BlessN900).

]]>3jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=942016-07-12T13:37:16Z2012-02-18T11:41:31Z]]>CrunchBang Linux (with the Openbox window manager) comes with a wallpaper browser and setter called nitrogen. I won’t go into any detail of how to use nitrogen, because I feel its menu is straightforward enough for even a beginner to use without any difficulty. Instead, what I want to talk about is how to use alphabetic sorting with nitrogen.

This is something that bugged me right away about nitrogen, by default when you launch it, the images are not sorted in any way useful to me. According to the nitrogen man pages:

By default, items are sorted as they are found on the filesystem, giving a quasi-newest first sorting order.

I always use one of two types of sorting when browsing files: modification time or alphabetic. In the case of wallpapers, I prefer to have nitrogen sort these alphabetically. And if you’re into that type of stuff too, here is how it’s done.

First, let’s see what nitrogen looks like without sorting. To do this, you need to launch nitrogen. In Openbox, simply right-click on the desktop and go to Settings and then click on Choose Wallpaper.

As you can see by the file names, the images listed by nitrogen are in no particular order, which can make it difficult for me to find wallpapers. And I usually end up scrolling up and down, looking for that right one….. I know it’s here somewhere…

Going back to the man pages, let’s see what it says about sorting:

$ man nitrogen

–sort=[option]
Sorts the background list by the given option. By default, items are sorted as they are found on the filesystem, giving a quasi-newest first sorting order. Valid options are:

alpha Alphabetical order.

ralpha Reverse alphabetical order.

time Modified time, ascending.

rtime Modified time, descending.

–sort=alpha /path/to/folder/containing wallpapers. Wonderful. Just what I was looking for.

Now that we know how to get nitrogen to alphabetically sort our wallpapers, we could open up a terminal and type (in my case):

$ nitrogen –sort=alpha ~/images/wallpapers

Please note those are two ‘-‘. Not one. WordPress is making it look like it’s just one minus, and I don’t know how to change that.

Everytime we need to use nitrogen. Or to make things easier we could just put this in ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml so that everytime we launch nitrogen through the Openbox menu, the images are already alphabetically sorted.

Open menu.xml with your favourite text editor. Mine happens to be vim, but you could also use Geany, which also comes default with CrunchBang Linux since Statler R20111125.

$ vim ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml

menu.xml is the configuration while for the Openbox menu. You can find all the right-click menu entries in there and easily tweak them to your needs. Make sure you backup the file before every edit. That way, if you muck something up, you could always go back to a last known good config.

Find the line where the nitrogen menu entry is. At the time of writing this blog post it should look like this, by default. Look at the line where my cursor is:

And so we make the necessary changes to get nitrogen to always launch with alphabetic sorting. This means we add the –sort alpha option. Note that the path ~/images/wallpapers/ is the path to the folder where I save all my wallpapers. Make sure you have that set to the path where you save your wallpapers.

Save the menu.xml file and close it. In order for these menu changes to take effect, you will need to reconfigure Openbox. Right-click on the desktop and go to Settings, then to Openbox and click on Reconfigure.

So, if you launch nitrogen again, you will see that the images are now listed alphabetically, which I think is a much more usable approach. Now, if I could only get round to giving all my wallpapers descriptive file names, then this would be even more usable.

nitrogen sorted

Note: On my netbook (Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450 @ 1.66GHz) launching nitrogen on a folder with lots of hi-resolution wallpapers tends to max out my CPU. The 50%-65% CPU usage by nitrogen tends to push the CPU all the way up to 100%. So, I try to be quick about it, in and out. Use at your own risk.

EDIT: As pointed out by Kris in the comments (3):

**IMPORTANT** -if you have nitrogen hotkeyed (i have mine set to W+n) you also need to add the “–sort=alpha [path]” line to the execute command in your rc.xml file as well as the menu.xml

]]>6jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=832016-07-12T13:37:05Z2011-06-15T19:04:31Z]]>I need everything to be just where it’s supposed to be, when I’m working on my CrunchBang netbook. I use the Openbox version and absolutely love it for it’s light weight and high configurability.

With any given window manager or any given desktop environment I like to have my daily used apps and windows always on the same desktop/workspace. Usually, I’ve got at least four desktops. Right now I use three desktops in Openbox on my netbook.

On the first desktop I always have Zim, my main xfce4-terminal, my work-related Iceweasel window, Icedove. My second desktop is usually empty, unless I’m watching a movie with VLC or image editing with GIMP. I keep this window free for “random” apps. The third desktop is home to my personal-use apps and windows, Choqok, Pidgin, more Iceweasel.

All these apps I’ve just mentioned, wouldn’t it be cool if every time I launched them, they automatically went to the right desktop? Here’s how I use this feature in Openbox.

Open the ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file with your favourite text editor.

I use three desktops in Openbox. Find the block. The relevant parts of my rc.xml look like this:

<desktops>
<!– this stuff is only used at startup, pagers allow you to change them during a session these are default values to use when other ones are not already set by other applications, or saved in your session use obconf if you want to change these without having to log out and back in –>
<number>3</number>
<firstdesk>1</firstdesk>
<names>
<name>1</name>
<name>2</name>
<name>3</name>
</names>

</desktops>

Now, in the following block I set per application settings for Iceweasel (firefox-bin), Choqok, Pidgin, Icedove and Zim. Per application settings belong in theblock. Go forth and find them.

You can see from the tags that when I launch Choqok and Pidgin they get put in Desktop 3, while Icedove and Zim are put in Desktop 1.

Be sure to use the proper application names. More info on this can be found in the applications section of the Openbox wiki.

]]>0jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=682016-07-12T13:36:53Z2011-03-28T16:49:43Z]]>As you can see from the screenshots I’ve posted so far, I use CrunchBang with the Openbox window manager. The panel that comes with CrunchBang+Openbox is known as tint2, which according to the project’s homepage is “a simple panel/taskbar unintrusive and light (memory / cpu / aestetic)”. I love this combination of CrunchBang+Openbox+tint2. The default setting of tint2 in CB is “always on top”. In this post I’ll show you how to autohide your panel. I personally prefer “always on top”, but maybe some of you like your panel to autohide? Only just yesterday, someone in the Statler group on identica asked if anyone knew how to autohide the panel.

In CrunchBang 10, your tint2 configuration file is located in ~/.config/tint2/tint2rc. It is good idea to backup config files before you edit them. I do this all the time, and I’m beginning to need to set something up with git to better manage my vast legion of backup configs. More on that in some other blog post in future.

Open your tint2rc and look for the section labeled PANEL. Should look something like this:

Your panel should now autohide after 2 seconds. That’s the time set in autohide_hide_timeoutin your tint2rc.

For a description of the other attributes in the autohide block, check the tint2 wiki.

]]>4jargonhttps://jargonsummary.wordpress.comhttp://jargonsummary.wordpress.com/?p=602016-07-12T13:36:14Z2011-03-13T20:54:52Z]]>This latest episode in Canonical’s blatant attempts at discrediting GNOME and pulling away contributors/supporters marks (see what I did there?) yet another low point in Canonical’s role in the FOSS community. And in Canonical’s case, I use the term “FOSS” loosely. Canonical is like that one kid in kindergarten that just does not get along well with the other kids, and often throws a fit and takes his ball and stomps home when they refuse to play by his rules. Shuttleworth in his latest anti-GNOME blog post makes a series of unsupported claims, and I sincerely hope the FOSS community at large is able to see through his smoke and mirrors.

Hold on a sec. There’s been ample documentation of conversations.

How about some citations to support this?

After a year or so of being the public whipping boy for cutting commentary from competitors under the Gnome banner, a franker line is needed.After a year or so of being the public whipping boy for cutting commentary from competitors under the Gnome banner, a franker line is needed.

Dare we look forward to times of less and less backbiting and complaining from your end, then?

Unity could quite easily move to the fore in GNOME, if it won this competition, just like lots of other ideas and pieces of code have started outside the core of GNOME but become essential to it.

If starting from the outside (the core) of GNOME isn’t such a hinderance to the success of an idea, then why not go ahead and complete your fork and then let the results speak for themselves? I suspect your long-term goal was to get GNOME to replace GNOME Shell with Unity, because you actually want to avoid competition, not encourage it. If competition was truly your motivator, you would have completed your fork without your transparently half-hearted attempt at Unity inclusion in GNOME, external or internal.

Owen’s argument reinforces the idea (which is in my view broken) that the only idea that matter are the ones generated internally to the GNOME project (defined very tightly by folks who maintain core modules or have core responsibilities). It’s precisely this inward view that I think is leading GNOME astray.

This so far takes the cake. See, for Canonical, the only ideas that matter are the ones generated internally, e.g. moving the buttons to the left (and rejecting the opinions of the community, because “This is not a democracy!”), changing the default search engine in Firefox, including in Ubuntu proprietary software like Ubuntu One, copyright assignment to Canonical of what should be FOSS contributions.

This last aspect by itself completely invalidates any claim you might have about caring for the interests of GNOME. If GNOME’s interests were of any importance to you, you would *not* ask it to adopt software that is copyrighted to Canonical, and you would *not* try to dip your hand in the cookie jar by hustling revenue off Banshee developers, which was supposed to go to GNOME, 100%.

Owen’s point that “no widget should go into Gtk if it is not needed by a GNOME application” is unlikely to be comforting to the XFCE folk, or other desktop environments which build on GNOME. If anything, it will make them feel that things in “core GNOME” are likely to be difficult to adopt and collaborate with, because their needs, apparently don’t matter.

Simply put, please let “the XFCE folk” – or whomever you refer to with this vague descriptor – speak for themselves. You obviously already have your hands full speaking for yourself and Canonical.

He also says “But I’ve never seen Canonical make the leap and realize that they could actually dive in and make GNOME itself better.”.. which is rather insulting to all the people from Canonical who spend a lot of their day doing exactly that.

What “all the people from Canonical” spend a lot of their day doing, unfortunately, is “ubuntufying” Debian and GNOME, and hardly – if ever – sending anything back upstream.

Finally, Owen concludes that having Unity and Gnome Shell as separate desktops may be the only way forward. Seems like he’s worked hard to ensure that’s the case.

Pointless conjecture. You’re not helping yourself.

Yes, that’s true. But Unity was simply the new name for work which has been ongoing since 2007: The Ubuntu Netbook Remix interface. That work was very much in the frame throughout, and it’s been suggested that it was that work which catalysed Gnome Shell in the first place.

Citations, please?

As I’ve shown above, the stated requirements are a very low bar. We did that, and more, yet the App Indicator API’s were rejected.

Why not post some links to mailing list archives? IRC logs? All this vague handwaving in response to Jeff Waugh’s well-documented timeline is rather weak.

Unfortunately for Jeff, we’d been told in no uncertain terms that module owners and core apps were under pressure about these API’s.

Not once so far have you offered anything in support of the array of claims and accusations you’ve been making all weekend. This is extremely bad form for the head of Canonical, I must say.

In fact, it’s what’s left that collaboration in limbo. What to do with all the patches produced for GNOME apps that make them work with app indicators?

This is the problem. Canonical expect to have their “contributions” auto-included in GNOME simply by throwing half-finished code over the wall with that now infamous “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude. And when, understandably, your “contributions” are rejected you throw a tantrum. It’s getting really old, now.

Ironically, you seem unwilling to accept GNOME’s decision to stick with GNOME Shell is – in simplified terms – based on the same reason Canonical sticks with Unity: you each feel you’ve got a better idea than the other. And there’s not much wrong with that, in my opinion. However, it starts becoming a problem when you try to shove Unity down GNOME’s throat and then get bent out of shape when they won’t have it.

For all your posturing about how much you care for GNOME and FOSS and how superior Unity is, why not move forward? If Canonical is incapable of working with GNOME, and you don’t like the GNOME way, then be mature and go your own way. All your diatribes are helping neither GNOME nor Canonical.